“Everything That Can Be Invented”: Not in Duell’s Report

What does Duell’s report for 1899 say?

The report covers the business of the Patent Office for the year ending December 31, 1899. Duell dated it January 31, 1900, and it was laid before the Senate on February 19, 1900 (Exhibit A, p. iii). He signed it as Commissioner and wrote that he had then held the post for two years (p. xi).

Its numbers describe an office with more work every year. In 1899 it received 38,937 applications for patents on inventions, 2,400 for designs and 106 for reissues, 41,443 in all, and it issued 25,435 patents, designs included (pp. iii–iv). The “field of search,” the earlier patents and books an examiner had to check, “increases greatly every year,” and the new system of classes had to be “sufficiently elastic to provide for future growth” (p. viii).

Most of the closing pages are requests. The business of the office “increases from year to year,” Duell wrote, so it needed more space, and he backed Senate Bill No. 1,159 for a fireproof building “including a Hall of Inventions” (p. x). He asked for money to keep the library “abreast of the progress” in the mechanical and manufacturing arts, and for a rule that an application pending more than three years would lose part of its seventeen-year term (p. xi). The report is his own account to Congress, written partly to win room and money, so it shows what he chose to tell lawmakers, not every view he held.

Seven statements from the report for 1899, in page order. Hollow tags state growth; filled tags ask Congress for something (Exhibit A).

The last page quotes President McKinley’s annual message of December 5, 1899: “To invention we must turn as one of the most powerful aids to the accomplishment of such a result.” Duell then closed with a question: “May not our inventors hopefully look to the Fifty-sixth Congress for aid and effectual encouragement in improving the American patent system?” (Exhibit A, p. xii) Nowhere from page iii to page xii does the report say that invention was over.

The two reports, one row per statement, with pages (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Report of the Commissioner of Patents for 1843 (1844) and for 1899 (1900)

Where does the line come from?

The earliest printing of the line found for this page is in Punch’s Almanack for 1899, in a run of short comic scenes headed “The Coming Century” (Exhibit B). One scene is set in the office of a publisher. A visitor called Genius asks for the manager of the book department and is told there is none, and that the pictures are done by machinery.

When he asks whether there is a clerk who can examine patents, an office boy answers that none is needed: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” (Exhibit B) The joke is about a future run by machines. Its speaker is a boy in a publisher’s office, and no commissioner or patent office appears in the joke. The Almanack pages in the volume read here carry no page numbers, so the citation gives the title of the scene.

Illustration

An illustration of an imagined scene, not a page from Punch: a visitor at the counter of a publisher’s office and the office boy who answers him, the setting of the joke in the Almanack for 1899.

An earliest printing found is a limit, not a first use. In dating terms it is a terminus ante quem, a date by which the line must already have existed; an older printing may still turn up. The same reasoning is set out on how a dated printing gives a latest date, not a first one.

This page did not trace when the line first became attached to Duell’s name. Between the Almanack joke and the 2014 editorial, no printing that names Duell was read here, and the timeline above leaves that stretch empty.

Do other claims of impossibility have a source?

One commissioner came close to the famous line, 56 years before Duell’s report. H. L. Ellsworth’s report for 1843, dated January 31, 1844, has this sentence: “The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” (Exhibit C, p. 5)

Read in place, the sentence follows his note on papers about recent improvements, which the office’s examiners wrote at his request and which Ellsworth called “full of encouragement and gratification to the American people” (pp. 5–6). Earlier in the same report he wrote that the progress of improvement in the arts brought “a renewed demand for greater accommodations” every year (p. 2). Like Duell, he used growth to ask for room.

Applications and patents as each report counts them: Ellsworth’s for 1843 (p. 1) and Duell’s for 1899 (pp. iii–iv). The 1899 application figure counts inventions only (Exhibits A, C).

The two reports show how much the work grew. Ellsworth counted 819 applications for patents in 1843 and 531 patents issued (Exhibit C, p. 1). Duell counted 38,937 applications for inventions in 1899, nearly 48 times as many, and 25,435 patents issued (Exhibit A, pp. iii–iv).

An impossibility claim with a firm source looks different. In April 1836 the Southern Literary Messenger printed an unsigned essay by Edgar Allan Poe on the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing figure then on tour (Exhibit D). If the Turk were a “pure machine,” he wrote, “we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind” (p. 319). He then argued that it was not one: “It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else.” (p. 319)

Poe’s claim has a date, a journal and a page, so it can be tested. Later accounts bear him out about the Turk itself, as the retrial of the Mechanical Turk and Poe’s 1836 argument sets out. The line pinned on Duell has no such anchor, so this page checks a source instead of scoring a forecast. Forecasts with a printed date are scored item by item under the Hindsight score rules, as with Halley’s 1705 forecast of the comet’s return and the Ladies’ Home Journal’s 1900 forecasts, scored item by item.